Hey, folks. It's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now, I am honored to be sitting down with Jeff Richards, who is the founder and CEO of Mooala. Jeff, it's great to see you. Ray, thanks for having me on. Thanks so much for being with us in this makeshift studio in our Austin Airbnb. We're hours away from our Taste Radio Austin meetup, and you so graciously came down from Dallas here to Austin.
Do you come down? Is it a north-south thing, east-west? I don't know. It's north-south. Okay. So straight down I-35. It's about a three-hour trip, and today I've wound up in the lion's den here at HQ for- Yes ... the BevNet folks, this is BevNet HQ, the temporary HQ as it is, but I hope you like our digs.
It's nice over here, isn't it? I love them, and it is rare you get to be this close and personal with people in their living space there's a daybed to my left, which is crazy, but you know what? It's working. It's working. You've been in the lion's den before with us. Yep. Do you remember this?
I'm gonna pull this up right now. BevNet Live Summer 2017. Oh, yes. This is when you first, or we first met you. This is your appearance in the New Beverage Showdown Semi-finals. This was nine years ago. Oh, yeah. And- we got beat by Rise. You know what? I don't... I wouldn't say you got beat because here you are on stage, a young Turk as it were, and talking about Mooala.
I remember your presence and your composure. You were so good. So good on stage, and look at you go. That's awesome. I have the shirt. I considered wearing it to come full circle, but it's interesting what happens when you turn 40- ... and some things don't fit the way they used to. But I remember that was a nerve-wracking day.
Was it? You didn't seem nervous. Oh, man. That was unlike this discussion, that one was pretty well-rehearsed, so I practiced the heck out of that one 'cause you only had what 60 seconds to- So for the semi-finals, we only give you two minutes. Okay. And then for the final round, we give you five.
Okay. But two minutes is 120 seconds. It's not a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah, and we only give you the ability to show one slide, too. So if you have any other key details about the market- That's right ... or things you want to do, you can't really share them. You just gotta, you gotta wet the palate as best you can.
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I remember it was so fast. I'm usually, one of my flaws is that if I'm preparing for a presentation or something, I don't make copious notes. I just go ad hoc, but that one, 120 seconds, I remember I wrote down exactly what the script was- Yeah ... 'cause people would get dinged, and that was it.
You guys it's strict. Gong. It's strict. Gong. Yeah. You hit gong. Now, I wish we d- we dinged people. That'd be nicer, yeah. Yeah. But instead, we have someone in the back smacking a big piece of steel. Yeah. You were in private equity before you got into this crazy CPG business. Yep. Yeah, that's a nice transition.
Yeah. I would say private equity is generous. I was on the investment banking side- Okay ... on the leverage finance side, so a lot of kind of private debt for private equity buyouts. And I didn't know it, it wasn't this way at the time, but private debt would become very sexy the moment I left. Private debt is the hottest thing in the finance world right now, and then it's becoming less hot as there's a bubble forming, but...
plant-based milk was pretty damn hot in 2017. Yeah. And you were striking while the iron was hot, and Moala, I think, was differentiated in so many different ways, especially because you had a banana milk, and you still have a banana milk, and I think it's one of your most iconic or most well-known SKUs, that is.
It was always the big question of, okay, small brands are doing interesting, differentiated things in plant-based milk, but there's so many established players out there, so many well-financed players out there. Where did you see you could make a real impact? Where did you see that you could stand out with a brand like Moala?
In the early days, separate from the founder story, when I decided that almond milk was the right place to be, that decision was driven by Silk and Blue Diamond basically creating a billion-dollar category overnight by putting almond milk in the fridge and displacing soy milk sales and making plant-based milk a thing that was actually...
consumers can wrap their brains around almond milk. Soy milk was always a little bit of a, a polarizing thing, but the consumer really latched on to almond milk when they launched the category, and it became this billion-dollar business. But I saw the opportunity as there's basically four quadrants in, in those initial days of flavor.
It was sweetened Unsweetened, vanilla flavored, or plain. And all the sales were split across those four categories, and no one was really leaning into real ingredients. And by meaning nobody, I meant those two brands. And so I was like I was an investor, very small, meaningless investor in Deep Eddy Vodka, which was launched in Austin, and they had great success using real ingredients in their vodka.
So it was sweet tea vodka with real tea, and grapefruit vodka was their home run, but they used real grapefruit. And I was like why isn't anybody doing that with almond milk?" There's a homemade element to it that you can incorporate, as opposed to just being an industrialized, commercial product.
And so that was really the idea is, can we bring the real ingredient part of this into the almond milk space that's gonna create differentiation? And the founder fallacy is, if I can just get 5% of that billion-dollar market, I'll be pretty happy. So that was certainly the idea at the beginning. Banana milk, going back to banana milk, I think, was the product that really set you apart in my mind.
I hadn't seen anything like this, and I thought there could be a lot of interest and demand among consumers of all ages for a product like this because it has a nutritional... or it would seem to have a nutritional benefit that other plant-based milks don't have. And this is something you were working on in your kitchen at home, I imagine.
Yeah. When did you feel like that was something that could be a product that would help to identify Moala as a challenger brand? Sure. Yeah, the banana milk has always been really important to us, just as a differentiator. But in those early days, banana milk was a thing before oat milk was a thing. So we were making banana milk before Oatly came Stateside and started ripping the world apart on the plant-based milk side.
And the goal was to find, for banana milk, I went through a number of different product formulations trying to figure out what the answer was, but I wanted an allergen-free milk. Again, this is pre-oat milk, and so it was, is almond allergen, soy is an allergen, dairy, milk is an allergen. And I had started Moala out of a lactose intolerance issue that I have, and then I realized being nut-free and dairy-free would be a pretty great selling point for families.
And so banana is what popped into my brain. And yeah- Literally in my kitchen blending bananas, being like, "How do I not make this banana water?" Yeah. It was a challenge, but yeah it's basically the same recipe it's been for 10 years, how much banana puree do you still have on your ceiling?
Yeah. Yeah, lots of lids off the blender when you're jamming through iterations, for sure. I wanna go back to s- what you talked about in terms of your ingredients, and transparency, and organic. I think these are all things that really do differentiate Muala from other brands on the market. The intentionality of how you communicate what you're about, and the hierarchy of needs for consumers of yours, is it as simple as, "This is who we are, this is what we're about, and try our products"?
Or, what helped unlock the value that Muala was offering to consumers? What really gave them confidence that this is gonna be a brand for them and their families? Yeah. CPG is a weird world, and you need so many different things to go right and make sense and come together at the same time for the consumer to demand the product.
And, you can push the product on customers as much as you want, you can tell them about it, you can scream at them, and, but if they're ultimately not demanding the product, then, you've got a problem. And so we've been, since day one, we were really early to organic, and the consumer didn't care.
It was good enough to be plant-based, and everybody's isn't that just organic?" The understanding in the early days of what organic wasn't in our favor. There was confusion among consumers as to plant-based and organic being two distinct attributes? Yeah, I think the general perception was, "Oh, it's plant-based.
That means it's already organic." It was so early that plant-based was already such an incremental improvement to people from a dairy milk that like, "Oh, I have to think about organic now as well?" Like with... So it was just, I think, one step too far for the consumer who was just finding plant-based milk for the first time.
You're like, "Oh it also needs to be organic," was a little bit of a... Just it took education. It took time. And so only until about really three years ago, organic just wasn't a core component of the plant-based milk market. And given how early we were to the category, we were great at picking up distribution.
I always say if you could put one thing on my tombstone, it would be that Jeff earned distribution he didn't deserve, and he held onto distribution he didn't deserve. And so we kinda went through a couple different phases with the brand. If you look at our initial packaging, it was a very farm fresh, flavor forward, organic forward package, and we got this great distribution, but the velocities weren't there, and so we tried a couple different pivots.
One of which was taking the brand in a much more kid-friendly direction and de-emphasized organic, and then all of a sudden, the consumer started to care about organic, and we had a little bit of a hangover from looking a little bit more like a family-friendly kids brand to where we're like, "No, we need to focus on having organic on the package.
We need to communicate our flavor strategy and our ingredient strategy," because that's core in our DNA. We've always used awesome ingredients like bananas, honey, real vanilla beans, and that wasn't being communicated on the label. And so I think simplifying and say, "We're organic. This is what we use. This is where it comes from," made the consumer more willing to try it and take it off the shelf, and then it's always tasted great.
And so when we were actually getting people to try the product because it looks pretty and resonates with the consumer, that has proved to be one of our most important changes, is communicating that simplicity in the organic part of the brand. When you realize something is off, do you feel like you need to make that change quickly, or do you have to be cautious and pretty thoughtful about how you're gonna roll out those changes?
Yeah, I would say we've embraced a strategy of incrementality. A- Adam Bachelor, who's our president and COO, brings a little bit more of a dynamic look at things where I'm "If it's 90% there, let's move on." I've had to develop that just as a through the founding days. Sure. And just like at some point, you gotta call things done and move on.
And it's been really good to have different voices in the room to where we have focused on, different from what my strategy has been historically, just making things a little bit better, always making things a little bit better, making things a little bit better. And so specifically with the label, when organic became more important, we made organic a little bit bigger.
It was before the final state that we're in today. But we think it's important to make sure you're continuing to improve, even if you've got a product that at one point you thought was good enough, taking another look at it, and making sure you're updating and keeping things fresh, and never settling is really important to us.
The category has evolved in which there's a push for more simplistic packaging. The categories used to be full of just words, right? To my point earlier was this brand of almond milk, there's a lot of words to potentially communicate on the package- ... when you're talking about plant-based milk.
And you, and we've seen it. Yeah. There's a lot of complicated messaging, particularly within the plant-based milk category, which is strange because you want less. Yeah. As a consumer, speaking for myself, if I see less on, on the front of pack, I feel like I'm getting more- Yeah ... in a weird way. Absolutely.
Yeah. That seems to be the way of the world currently. And so you have to pick what you're gonna communicate. You can communicate unsweetened, sweetened vanilla, chocolate, almond milk, oat milk, and on top of that, is it organic? What is your brand name? How much is in a container? Are you gonna have a picture on there?
So I think we see this when we were working on French packaging for the Canadian market, it's "Dude, this is just a paragraph on the front," so many descriptors. And so I think you just have to pick and choose, like everything can't be big, and it all seems equally important to the customer. And so everything can't be big and important.
I, but I think what is winning currently is leaning into the things that are most important to your brand and letting those lead on package, 'cause you can't say everything on the front all at once. Yeah. And I think retail buyers want to see something that is differentiated as well, whether it's- A brand like Moala that has a flavor SKU like banana or an almond milk that has four ingredients, and I think that probably helps unlock a lot of the distribution that you said you hadn't earned, but really you did, and gotten retail buyers excited about putting your brand on shelf.
But making that jump from regional distribution to national distribution seems like a pretty straightforward process, but is anything but. How do you go about taking your brand, or how did you go about taking Moala from where we are now in the Southwest to one that could be sold anywhere in the United States?
Yeah. The distribution part has been funny because we initially made our products in Southern California. And all of the distribution... So initially we got into H-E-B, Whole Foods, Central Market And Costco, all that in Texas or the Southwest. And with perishable distribution and with expensive products like organic almond milk, it needs to work pretty fast.
And work meaning you need to get some momentum because it's expensive, and you need to raise money. It's really hard not to raise money when you're doing a perishable product. And so after that initial phase of distribution where we at least proved that in Texas we were gonna earn distribution, the next wave was the Northeast.
And so we were shipping product from SoCal by train because it was a little bit cheaper, even though it took two weeks, up to the Northeast. In refrigerated cars? Yeah, it was. And it took a long time, but you'd save, a grand on, or whatever on the shipment by going by rail. And I had to learn the Northeast market pretty quick.
This is how naive I was. In 2016, 2017, I did not know what Wegmans was. When we got in, I didn't know what it was. And like- wait a minute. You said, "When we got in." So you got into a retail chain, and you didn't know what the retail chain was? Wegmans was interested in authorized-
Banana Milk, and I got emailed by Unify to get set up in Wegmans, and- I see. I'm sure I'd heard the name. I just didn't know that's the H-E-B of the Northeast, right? It's like you should know what Wegmans is. So we had to pretty quickly figure out a number of things, most of all the cost component of it.
But once Wegmans moved, then all of a sudden the Northeast was unlocked. And then from there, it's been, we're in every state except maybe North Dakota. I think getting that name brand, it really helped to get H-E-B on board early. It really helped get Wegmans on board early. Man, Costco was super early.
Same with Whole Foods. And so you have enough of those logos- ... on a deck, and plant-based milk was so hot that it was never easy, but getting those early wins with the big names gave that scarcity, it girl sort of feeling when we would pitch to retailers. But even if you get into those stores, it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna sell in those stores.
And especially, again, for a brand that didn't, I'm making this assumption, but probably didn't have a lot of marketing dollars, didn't have a lot of money to go spend on brokers and merchandisers to help your brand stand out on shelf. So how do you make sure that you're driving trial and awareness at a place like Wegmans, where probably at the time they had 150 stores or maybe 300 stores, something like that?
Right around 100. 100 stores. Obviously, you're not traveling up there and spending two weeks at a time selling the product, so how do you get the retail buyers not just interested in selling your brand, but helping them turn while on shelf? Yeah. It's hard. So Wegmans has what's called EDLP strategy, which means everyday low price, and so they expect you to put all of your funding into providing them with the best possible everyday price, so you can't do promotions.
There's no ads. At the time, there was not online advertising, so you're It is pure competition. You've got your product on shelf, and it's the price that it is. You don't get a lot of in-store trial, and so certainly social media, this is back when you could- do very specific targeting, with Facebook and Instagram that you can't do anymore, by demographic, by age, and down to putting a geo-fence around independent stores.
So that was a lot of what we did just to get the word out there. But honestly, it was just kinda like a hope the package is pretty enough, hope people buy it, and we were lucky that it worked out in those early days. Part of just the joys of starting a brand is it's not gonna work everywhere. We would get discontinued out of places.
H-E-B wasn't aware that we were local and small, and within three months on shelf we got discontinued out of H-E-B. Talk about a gut punch when your brand is- Your home market ... a year old. Yeah. And then we connected with the buyer, and he's "I didn't realize you were..." He was, I think he was new to the desk.
He's "I didn't realize you were local and new," so he put us back in. It's like things like that are just so gut-wrenching for a brand. It's tough. You can't promote the way you want to. You can't market the way you want to. There is certainly this element of man, I just hope it works on shelf, and I hope that what we executed on the packaging side is pretty enough to drive trial, and I hope the flavor's good enough that they come back and buy it.
It is, it's, especially in dairy, it's hard You don't get secondary displays. You can't go put a pallet of milk on the floor to grab people's attention. You got your slot on the shelf and you compete. This is why I wanted to spend so much time on your communication and marketing strategy as it relates to your label and design strategy, because I think, and it feels Moala does sell itself a lot through its packaging.
Pretty packaging aside, though, I think the other big part of it is what we talked about earlier in terms of ingredients and transparency and the organic factor as well. These are all things that resonate with modern consumers. Price is another part of it, though. We talked about some of the biggest brands in the industry, and they can discount on price.
They can give an everyday low price that's just beating you by a number of dollars, I imagine. How do you think about pricing strategy, and how have you adjusted price to meet more consumers and to reach those households that can't necessarily afford the $8 price point that a lot of brands will start out at, especially in this space?
Pricing's always been interesting. The thesis behind Moala when we started it was affordable organic, and it still is. We don't wanna be at an unattainable price point for consumers. We wanna drive customers that are buying non-organic almond milk or plant-based milk or whatever into organic and not have it be a leap of faith on the price side or price prohibitive.
What was the initial price of Moala, say, a 48-ounce bottle of your almond or banana milk? Yeah. When we were manufacturing in SoCal and shipping to the Northeast, it was probably $6.99. Okay. Which today sounds right. We're talking 2017, but back in 2017, that was crazy. Yeah, that's true. It was pretty crazy high, and so yeah, adjusted for inflation, that would probably be like a $10, price point or something today.
Meanwhile, back then, pre-COVID, you're talking a half gallon of Silk or Blue Diamond, had a $2... It was $2 and something. That's just wild, right? But the super premium brands that were in the space were $7.99 yeah. And so though it's expensive, the pitch to retailers would be we're more affordable, and the organic will help convert consumers that are buying this less expensive product into this upsell, and, that's kinda been part of the pitch for a better part of 10 years.
When you walk into that room and start talking to a retail buyer, does the analytical matter more than the potential of what you can do. If you're pulling from data research, market research firms, does that make a bigger impact in the retail buyer's eyes than the potential for this to bring incremental value to their stores?
Yeah. It depended on how good the data was . Like- did they scrutinize the data? Do they scrutinize where it's sourced from? Yeah. I would say meetings are interesting in that you can make data look good. You guys are right in the heat of this with brands pitching for stories or whatever, but you can make data look good if you spend enough time cutting it the way you want to.
Sure. And 9 out of 10 meetings a buyer has, the brand they're talking to is doing amazing in the brand's eyes and wants to talk about all the positive things. So for us, it was always about, and continues to be about pitching the potential, but also, especially now, Mooala has quietly become, no matter how you look at it, past 4 weeks, 12, 24, 52 weeks, the number one growing velocity brand by a very large margin in plant-based milk.
And so That's a different story than when you have zero distribution in the Southeast, and you're talking about bringing incrementality, and they don't care how you're doing in SoCal or in Texas. It's what about my market?" And so no, they're... I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but if you've got good numbers, you show the good numbers.
That's just the easiest way to go with it, and if you don't, then you lean more into what, the hopes and dreams could be and avoid the numbers. I think it's also about how you interpret the data. You mentioned, okay, yeah, this is doing killer business in SoCal, but what does that mean for Miami?
Yeah. How does, how do the two relate? The way we innovated early on is much different than the way we innovate today. We launched a Keto Milk item in 2020 in the boredom of COVID when- You and a million other brands. Yeah. Yeah. If you're talking about degrees of innovation, Keto Milk is out there.
That's for a brand that had organic almond milk and organic banana milk, it was a trend play, and Keto Milk died. I should say keto died the month we launched Keto Milk. It was just the worst timing ever. But a well-documented situation in the industry is, what's next? What do you have next that's coming?
What's gonna shock us? What's gonna awe us? And, you guys make a living on that, right? And so there was that pressure, but the pressure was to be, like, really, what is the next out-there thing? It was like, oh, it was almond milk, then it was oat milk. Oat milk is the next thing, and then it was like what's coming next?"
And the answer is nothing's really come next, right? You've had other things swell and fall. You've had almonds swell and fall. You've had soy and coconut. But what we've seen is that kind of appetite for tremendous change-type innovation within plant-based milk is no longer there on the retail side.
You asked about how we got distribution so early. If you had something that had the word milk after it, and it was different, it was getting a shot in stores, for probably the better part of six or seven years. It just, that was the way it was. The more different and weird it was, the more excited people were to put it in.
And the reality is, with banana milk being an exception, the weird stuff doesn't work. And I go back to soy milk as the example. Soy milk has always struggled because it has a name problem. It has a, there's a negative connotation with soy. It's the same situation with, I'm not gonna call out any other bases specifically, but grass milk.
That's neat, but does that sound good? Yeah. And so I think a lot of what has launched, a lot of things that did launch and die, there's tons of brands entering and leaving this space every year, and the weird stuff is not getting trusted as much anymore. And so if you're not adjacent to something that the consumer recognizes, it's not really getting a shot on shelf because the consumer has proven to be kinda not willing to try the out-there stuff.
I think it's not just the consumer, I think it's the buyer, the distributor, the investor. There's only so far you can go with innovation, and if you go too far, people are gonna get confused, or it's gonna take a lot of consumer education, or it's going to take trial after trial before people actually get it.
And so I think when you said, yeah, you can be really weird, but that's not going to move the needle for you, is very true, and I think that's true for any category, not just plant-based milk. I think every entrepreneur I've ever spoken with has said that they love to create things. They love innovation.
They love to come up with new ideas for their brands. I've only heard from maybe two that said they love fundraising, they love raising money, which especially for an early-stage entrepreneur, is the most daunting part of the business. But Moala has raised quite a bit of money. Your seed round was $5 million?
Oh, I'd have to even go back and look. Yeah. It's it's been a while, but yeah. I think the seed round, when you added in all the different little convertible notes and things that we did, was probably, yeah, 5 million bucks. That sounds right. It's pretty significant, and you've, again, raised several million more since.
How do you know how much money you need to raise? How do you know when to raise money? How do you ask for money? Yeah. I would do a lot of things differently if I could start over, that's for sure. What? I lived in a... I say that, it's an easy thing to say, but I lived in a world where you could not get shelf stable.
Today it's easy to launch, relatively easy to launch a plant-based milk brand. Nothing's easy. Don't do it. Plant-based milk is hard. Don't enter the space. But everything was perishable. It had 120-day shelf life max at the beginning, which is just financial suicide. It was expensive packaging. It had to be kept cold.
I was trying my darndest to get Tetra Pak co-packers to make my product, but they were too busy. The market was so new and so hot, we were just too small and insignificant to get time on anybody's calendar. And so the reality was, I was either not gonna launch Moala, or I was gonna launch it in a very expensive packaging coming out of California, keeping it cold, and having things expire, almost guaranteed to expire given the short shelf life.
And so that decision meant I was going to raise money. It was too expensive, especially we got all those retailers on the East Coast. We were losing money on every bottle we sold, and it's either we do that or we don't start the brand. I wasn't confident bringing in other people's money until I knew that we were going to be capable of getting on shelf with retailers that mattered.
And I incubated Muala for five or six years. It started in 2011, was when I first formed the LLC, and it was in research mode and proof of concept mode for five or six years. And so I think if you're able to win in a retailer meeting, you're able to get on shelf, and you're able to show some semblance of life, of velocity, then that's probably the right time to think about raising money.
Otherwise, it just depends on your risk appetite, man. The sooner you bring in money, the sooner you're burning relationships, the sooner you're accountable to somebody else, and that's why I think I was talking about high margin categories. It's like the longer you can control your destiny, the better off you are burning your resources.
I've got 100 friends and family in my cap table. Would I recommend that to someone else? Depends on your risk appetite. I put all my financial and personal eggs in one basket, and that's costly. That's quite an investment. And so even if you're taking other people's money and it's not yours, you're still investing your relationships and your reputation.
And so you can very quickly convince yourself that with more money, I can make this brand successful. It's not right now. The velocities aren't there right now, but I just need to raise some money and then it'll be successful. You spend so much time and energy on your brand that you become convinced that it's worth pursuing.
And not talking about Muala specifically, but I think many founders go through an inflection point where they're not sure their brand is working, but they're gonna go raise money anyway. That's a dangerous thing to do, is be like, "I'm not sure this is working, but I'm this far in. My reputation's on the line, that I gotta keep going and lying," and lying is the wrong word.
But lie-- I think keeping up appearances is a big temptation that you're successful, and the short-term pleasure of raising a lot of money and being validated is very tempting versus being patient and more in the background and making your business work on a unit economics, velocity, and distribution standpoint before you start layering in a lot of relationship-driven risk.
It was fun when money was easy and plant-based was all the rage, from 2016 to 2020, and then we had a, the great reckoning of plant-based that we've experienced, and then to be where we are now, where we're really finally connecting... Organic had to be important. The products always tasted amazing, and now we're connecting with brand messaging for the first time at a price that works, and that's a blast, man.
Finally, we have all these different things lining up, and we're not guaranteed tomorrow, but man, I'm having a blast right now. And at some point, am I gonna have to help monetize? Yeah. Can I just enjoy what I'm doing for a little bit also? Yeah. I'd like that, Yeah. That's the most important part of being an entrepreneur, is enjoying the journey and being happy being your own boss, even if you are beholden to investors or whomever.
Your em- employees who are relying on you and their families are relying on you to make sure that this engine keeps going. So I think that enjoying the moment and enjoying the process is such a big part of it, and the fact that you're having a blast makes it that much better. We're really coming full circle here, 'cause I'm still thinking back to 2017 and seeing you on stage and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and excited about the future of the brand, and getting to a place right now where you are, for all intents and purposes, successful.
Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. I appreciate that, and coming full circle and being here talking with you guys today is awesome. The 10-year anniversary was 37 days ago, and so it's hard to believe, but yeah, it's been... Beverage School, my history with BevNET goes back to watching Beverage School, because that's all I had.
Yeah. Building a Beverage Empire was a book on selling energy drinks into C stores, and that's the closest thing I got to an education on how to sell almond milk into grocery retail except for Beverage School. So appreciate the work you guys always do. I am really happy to hear that, because if we can be a small part of your success and the fact that consumers are getting better products on shelf because of Beverage School, I think we did our job, and I'm really happy to hear that.
Nailed it. Yeah. Jeff, this has been great. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for coming down from Dallas. Oh, yeah. And making this trip to Austin. I am just thrilled for you and your team. I'm really excited to stay in touch and see where this all goes. Awesome. Likewise. Thanks, Ray.
Thank you.
